Sixty-two people ended up in the water when a small boat broke apart in the English Channel, and one of them did not survive. French authorities described the vessel as overloaded. It went down overnight from Sunday into Monday, according to the Maritime Prefect of the Channel and the North Sea.
A French Navy helicopter, helping with the search, spotted an unconscious person floating in the sea. A medical team aboard a French rescue tug pronounced that person dead.
Who pulled them out
Three crews shared the rescue. The French tug took 50 people from the water, the Border Force Ranger took nine, and the RNLI took two. A mother and her baby were taken to hospital in Boulogne-sur-Mer with hypothermia. Everyone else was landed at the Boulogne-sur-Mer quay, where land rescue services looked after them.
It was not the first death on the route that spring. A migrant also died trying to cross in April.
The numbers behind the crossings
More than 12,500 people had crossed the Channel in small boats by that point in 2025. In April alone, the cumulative total stood 42% above the same point in 2024, when it was 6,265, and 81% above 2023, when it was 4,899. Home Office figures showed more people arriving by small boat from January to April 2025 than in the same four months of any year since records of Channel crossings began in 2018. The government had vowed to crack down on people-smuggling across the Channel.
A deadlier incident in 2026
The danger has not eased. On a Thursday in April 2026, four people died near Calais while trying to board an inflatable dinghy. A group had waded out to reach the boat, which was sitting offshore. Christian Fourcroy, mayor of Equihen-Plage, told Reuters the attempt “went wrong” and the people “floundered in the water.” The dead were two women and two men, and a fifth person remained in critical condition.
Francois-Xavier Lauch, prefect of the Pas-de-Calais, told The Associated Press that 38 other people were rescued, one of them with a medical emergency. The dinghy itself moved into deeper water and carried on toward the United Kingdom. The Boulogne prosecutor opened an investigation.
The day before, French maritime authorities said 102 people had been rescued in two separate operations. A week earlier, two people died in a similar incident north of Calais. UK government figures show 4,776 people crossed between January 1 and April 4 of 2026, after more than 41,000 crossings in 2025.
Imran Hussain of the UK’s Refugee Council said after the April deaths that “policing the Channel alone is not enough to prevent dangerous crossings,” and that safer pathways were needed.
Sources
- Four die, dozens rescued in attempted Channel crossing from France to UK
- Migrant dies as small boat sinks crossing English Channel
Sources
- Four die, dozens rescued in attempted Channel crossing from …
- Migrant dies and dozens rescued after boat deflates in English …
